by Pam Burr Smith

The words “No Service” read across the top of my cell phone.
My laptop, after acting erratic, doesn’t respond at all.
The stuff, phone, computer, books, magazines, socks,
towels, sheets, the stuff that goes or needs washing,
sits in bags by the doors.
The keys, money, all I need to take with me from
place to place, loose on shelf near the door.

But not my soul.
My soul sits by that patient glass of new flowers,
the blooms missed by the foraging deer,
this morning’s blossoms gathered in wonder and gratitude
to live beside by the open window.

by Pam Burr Smith

I got the oversized blue denim oven mitts for you
and your new house.  They were so masculine and handsome,
like you.

I imagined you in your new kitchen,
making roasts and potatoes and who knows what else
a deep-voiced man with a big stove might cook.

You died so quickly, the house didn’t even
change hands.  And I didn’t give you the oven mitts,
because suddenly, you couldn’t hold anything.

Nor could we hold on to you, spare you from
the racing train of death that zeroed in on you
in the middle of full summer.

Fifteen years you’ve been gone,
and I still see you out of the corner of my eye.
You, jaywalking across a street, or striding down a lawn,

pausing to graze in a bookstore window.
Always curious and fresh.
Never in a rush.

by Katherine Hagopian Berry

Like me, you are difficult to love.
Beware, if you come into life
armed for battle, life will battle you:
parasitic flies, pesticides, gush water
from the camp hose
so many furious cans of Off.
Exiled, incubating small colonies
of the saved, I watch you dying
on the log bench, tangling
in breath, caught toxin,
I cannot fling it from me
there is still too much poison
lingering airborne
when I finally leave the room.

by Katherine Hagopian Berry

Across the dormant field we
crawl, tapping scrawny maples,
log, branch, glove,
bonded by deep freeze

our only heat electric,
orange cords arterial,
sawdust scattering its barren
seed over clouded ice.

I am too heavy to balance
on thin crusts for long,
so we leave it to our
children who report

each hesitant drop, wait
patiently for hope
to flood taps, shower
the sap hungry earth.

There is sugar enough to test
our faith in loss, black cauldron,
the pan I bought, decades ago,
to heat my feast for one.

The old spell was to bury
your worst fears alive:
that steam bleeding
down the kitchen window

has wedged a hole in things
irreversible.  That this time
it will not become
easier to breathe.

That my body won’t turn
to your body in the small bed.
Instead we tally production
golden in mason jars,

two, four, six, nineteen twenty,
How much, enough for next winter,
How much, enough for the end
of the world?